Free High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney

the next thing he knew he was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, hoping his car had one last long trip in her. For a snap decision, he had quite a few suitcases and satchels.
    I got to help him take his things to the “extra room,” which was little more than an extension of the attic, a graveyard for lamps, chests of drawers dotted with woodworm holes, and corner tables with wounded knees. There were three mattresses on the bed alone. He asked if I remembered him. I did and I didn’t. That was the way it was with the passing clouds of old-timers. I remembered the story that back in the Depression he played with Nobel Sissle’s orchestra and had been loved by “café society.” One night in London he was busy with last-minute changes in the program. He felt someone tug at his tails and slapped the hand away. He felt another tug and saw the Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, smiling. Uncle Castor’s surprise visit almost made up for Buzzy’s announcement that he was going to live with his father in Watts.
    I woke Uncle Castor at the crack of dawn. Yes, he had also seen the Duke of Kent before he was killed in the war.
    “Are you famous?”
    He tried his hands around my neck. “I will be by the time I get up.”
    Uncle Castor had brought his own sugar. He drank coffee with a cube between his teeth, wiped his hands with a soft handkerchief that he tucked up his left sleeve, and asked for toothpowder or dentifrice instead of toothpaste, all of which seemed to fit a man who dressed as flamboyantly and spoke as primly as George Washington Carver. Uncle Castor had sailed on the Ile de France , traveled on the Flying Scotsman , and been on friendly terms with the head porter of the North British Hotel. He had seen gigolos in Nice and Cannes with a suggestion of rickets in their leg do the Buzzard Lope and the Walk the Dog. He had made the Dolly sisters laugh. He promised to send me some of his clips, but he never got around to it.
    His life had been a travelogue, but around us his favorite topic was Grandfather. “To this day it is impossible to get through his head without an executive order.” Grandfather frequently said that his younger brother was a bum because (a) he had dropped out of the New England Conservatory, (b) he didn’t have two nickels to rub together, his savings would not fill the tip of his shoe, and (c) he never paid the phone bills he left behind.
    For his part, Uncle Castor answered that the only Latin Grandfather had ever had was “agricultural Latin.” In the program of a church conference of which he was moderator, Grandfather had added the University of Chicago to his education. “Those were correspondence classes,” Uncle Castor confided to my parents.
    The bad blood went back to the 1920s, when Uncle Castor arrived in Boston and Grandfather told him that he didn’t know enough Latin for the conservatory, that music students were expected to have mastered several languages. Uncle Castor took a job in a second-class hotel in order to pay for evening classes. The night school wanted to know why a colored boy needed to learn Italian. He also saved up for violin lessons. That’s when he found out that languages were only for voice students. His teacher took back his practice violin and recommended that Uncle Castor study the piano.
    I told him what Grandfather had said about our house. Uncle Castor remembered that the Klan so resented his mother’s parents they threatened to burn down their house if they painted it. Grandfather once told me that the family also came from Norfolk, that our name had Norman roots. Uncle Castor said his father and grandfather had been dark as tar. Uncle Castor was much lighter than Grandfather.
    I held to our Norman heritage all the way to and back from
the drugstore on the bad corner where Uncle Castor hadn’t been able to find his brand of cigars. He wrote down the serial number of every five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bill in his possession because in his time